The Dig Type Animation

[joelphilippage]

In the game, The Dig, the ghosts of the aliens have a weird animation effect. Does anyone know how this could be done?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnXikZBfQcc#t=5m30s

http://www.johnsendesign.com/ags/screenmags.png

[Igor Hardy]

If I remember right, the text on the game's box said it was done by ILM. So it's some neat CGI I guess.

[jetxl]

Just the work of pro animators.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIdF_VXTCwc&fmt=18#t=2m22s

[zabnat]

You'll need one or more of the following: money, hard work, pact with the Devil.

[Ryan Timothy B]

Seems like random scribbling to me.  Looks like something that could be easily done in photoshop.  Just use a transparency layer and make an alpha channeled mass of blue scribbles.  lol

This is of course assuming your game has 32 bit graphics enabled.
Otherwise, you'll have to make it solid and just lower the transparency in AGS (transparency only works with 16 or 32 bit color).  Unless you use the 256 color transparency module thingy (don't know what it's called).

[m0ds]

Someone like Helm could probably achieve this effect with pixels. A lot of people around here could too

[joelphilippage]

Well I've been using hand drawn animation for my game. What I could do is just invert the line color of an animation and then add a glow effect.

It doesn't look as cool as The Dig but I shouldn't expect too much and this would be much quicker. Any other Ideas?

[Scavenger]

That's a good start, but the animation in The Dig is punctuated by those blue vapor trails, which are pretty fun to do, really. Put the white outline layer above a transparent layer and paint away.



This is what I came up with. Very messy, since I don't have a wireframe pyramid, but I think this is what they did - they had the outline animated, and then drew some smoke effects around the wireframe in blue. To get that fading blue effect, I'd feather the smoke so the edges aren't too abrupt. I'd also do it sparingly, as it looks quite work intensive.

As an aside, the video from The Dig actually betrays what they did there - it's a prerendered movie, since the action occurs solely on the background layer. This way they didn't have to worry about in-game transparency. I believe it would be done by merging a background frame and an animation frame in Deluxe Paint. That would do it quite well.)

[joelphilippage]

That's looking pretty much right. Thanks for the tips. I'm guessing they made it in 3d, which I might do.

[Layabout]

It's not really a weird animation effect. That kind of thing, or better (since they couldn't use RGBa* which we can) is easily achieved in photoshop. it's all basic pose to pose traditional animation. It just is coloured with a blueish hue with a very bright white at the centre. I doubt 3D would have been used in these animations as it would have been far quicker to hand-draw this kind of thing. If you want to know how to achieve this effect, go read the Animators Survival Kit and the Illusion of LIfe. Then practice animation. Alot of animation.. Animate till all you can think about is how would I make this move and come up with an answer. Then go and animate. I'd suggest finding a book on anatomy before you go and do that though.

*RGBa = Red, Green, Blue + Alpha

[Mehrdad]

The DIG is a big game.with big team(Industrial light and magic<ILM>).but you can make this animations.you can found in this game 2d animation(characters)and 3d animation(Visual effect & some objects(your links)).so YOU CAN make this animations if you want.
some softwares: 2D(Animo-Toonz-ctp-....)& 3D(Lightwave3d-XSI-3dsmax...).

Note:This softwares is expensive.but have a good result.

[Obi]

http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorial/3d_light_casting/